One of my favorite examples is in the episode when Jesus walks on the sea of Galilee (Mark 6). What he does do is work carefully through many Gospel texts listening for the echoes and helping his readers see and experience these in fresh and exciting ways. In a sense he has done that already in earlier books mentioned above.
Hays does not spend his time working out and fine tuning a method. The NT is awash in figural readings of the OT.
Once a writer has released his text, later audiences are able to read backwards through significant events/persons in order to see connections to these earlier texts. At the heart of it is the notion that a text might mean more than a human author ever intended. It is a way of “reading backwards.” This has nothing to do with past predictions which are “fulfilled” in the future, although there are places when Gospel writers make those kinds of connections as well. The interplay between those two texts brings greater insight to both texts. Figural interpretation involves linking two texts so that a past person (or event) signifies that person as well as another in the future. Hays is influenced by Eric Auerbach’s approach to “figural interpretation” in his book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press, 2013). In the book under review Hays turns his attention to the four New Testament Gospels with similar method and surprising results. It echoes an even earlier bit of research written up in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (Yale University Press, 1993). This book extends an earlier project, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (Baylor University Press, 2014). He stepped down from his role as dean of Duke Divinity School for medical treatment and used part of his recovery to finish up this book. Hays was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the summer of 2015 and underwent successful surgery in the fall. Hays completed his new book Echoes of Scripture in Gospels (Baylor University Press, 2016) in record time thanks in large part to the heavy-lifting done by Carey Newman and his staff at Baylor University Press.
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